Education Startup Treehouse Branches Out to the iPad with a New App

After embracing gamification, hitting $3.6 million in revenues and raising $7 million, technology education startup Treehouse has launched its first iPad app.

Treehouse offers lessons across a range of subjects, from HTML, JavaScript and Ruby to UX design and businesses management. In general, these lessons follow a simple pattern: you watch videos, answer questions, and then — if it’s a programming course — you’ll write and edit code within the app.

Coding on the iPad isn’t new nor has it proved a productive task, and that’s why Treehouse never actually tasks you to build an entire site from scratch using the app. Instead, Treehouse simply helps you get your feet wet by letting you play with code throughout your lessons.

The app is free and largely works like the site in tablet-optimized form, but it requires a Treehouse membership (so, it’s not really free), and that’ll set you back $25 to $45 per month. This price is worth it if you’re serious about learning to code and want to explore different ways of doing so, but if you’re only dabbling, you’ll probably find it prohibitive.

Update: While Treehouse offers Android lessons, Apple, annoyingly, did not allow them to be included in the app :

We teach Android at Treehouse as well, but Apple has refused to let us release the app while including Android content. At the time of review several other applications in the App Store included Android content, but in our case we were told it was against App Store guidelines to have Android content in our app.